1914 The People's Home Library

Christina, a friend of mine, lent me this great old reference book. Copyrighted 1910 and published in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914 by the R.C. Barnum Company, The People's Home Library is a giant of a book -- three books, actually, combined under one binding for something like a combined 1,032 pages and weighing four pounds five ounces!

The book is a compendium of information. Book I is home medical advice, including advice on marriage, recipes for patent medicines such as Shiloh's Consumption Cure and Oil of Gladness (which requires 1 fluid dram of Tincture of Opium), and advice on baby colic.

I'm not sure how sound all of the medical advice remains -- for a nose bleed it suggests shoving grated dried beef up your nose, but it's fascinating to browse through.

Moving right out of home remedies for hives, we get Book II, with recipes for corn bread and custard, and instructions for setting the table.

The logical next step would be: veterinary diagrams and instructions for livestock, of course. Actually, it makes sense, as this was meant as a how-to book for rural inhabitants to handle almost any situation.

With some things incredibly outdated and other topics still relatively unchanged, this is a browsing book, and at more than 1,000 pages, that's a lot of browsing.